SIAH: Public Life - Richard Sennett Event

SIAH: Public Life (Series abstract)

Arts and Humanities have always been crucial to the idea of the 'public life': the public is valorised as the realm of collective debate and decision-making, of community and solidarity, of art and culture. Such concepts, of course, have always been contested and never more so than right now. The electronic capture of the commons, the removal of boundaries between work and home, the policing of public spaces, the onslaught of the culture wars, the hold of big data and surveillance, the spectacles of populist politics have all changed the meanings, the spaces and the limits of the public sphere.

SIAH: Public Life draws a range of leading intellectuals into conversation about what the ideal of the 'public life' can mean to Arts and Humanities researchers and disciplines in the twenty-first century.

Speaker biography

Richard Sennett currently serves as Chair of the UN Habitat Urban Initiatives Group.  He is Senior Fellow at the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at MIT.

Previously, he founded the New York Institute for the Humanities, taught at New York University and at the London School of Economics, and served as President of the American Council on Work.

Over the course of the last five decades, he has written about social life in cities, changes in labour, and social theory. His books include The Hidden Injuries of Class, The Fall of Public Man,  The Corrosion of Character, The Culture of the New Capitalism,  The Craftsman, and  Building and Dwelling.

Among other awards, he has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.

Richard Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago.  He attended the Julliard School in New York, where he worked with Claus Adam, cellist of the Julliard Quartet.  He then studied social relations at Harvard, working with David Riesman, and independently with Hannah Arendt.